What are JUSTICE scores?

JUSTICE scores are an attempt to measure the ideology of the supreme court over time. The data includes a score for each justice’s vote that says it is either liberal or conservative. I’ve aggregated that by year and then subtracted the number of the conservative votes by the number of liberal votes divided by the total number of votes to give me a “JUSTICE score” (named after NOMINATE scores which measure congressional ideology). They range from -1-1, with a negative score being liberal and a positive score being conservative.

All-time JUSTICE scores

Click the lines on the legends to see progression of JUSTICE score for individual justices. Toggle the dots to disable/enable certain courts.

References

Harold J. Spaeth, Lee Epstein, Andrew D. Martin, Jeffrey A. Segal, Theodore J. Ruger, and Sara C. Benesh. 2020 Supreme Court Database, Version 2021 Release 01. URL: http://Supremecourtdatabase.org"